When he was five, six, seven, and eight, Max spent most of the summer thinking about the whale, sitting in his room with the shades drawn remembering the first visit and looking forward to the second, just before the new school year....more

C Squared, an offshoot of our True Romantic column, is a series in which couples are invited to share stories about themselves, their experiences in love, their problems and pleasures and romantic rituals. ...more

Author Benjamin Parzybok talks about his new novel, Sherwood Nation, climate fiction, the difference between post-collapse and post-apocalyptic, and how novels can predict the future if they try hard enough (and get lucky). ...more

Author Laura van den Berg talks to the Rumpus about why she thinks America is obsessed with dystopias, the intersection of surrealism and realism in her work, and choosing an ambiguous ending for her new novel, Find Me. ...more

In episode 28 of The Rumpus’s Make/Work podcast, host Scott Pinkmountain speaks with the composer/performer Pamela Z about her penchant for databases, life without a security net, and the benefits of the one-a-day Squickie. ...more

The Rumpus Blog

For all her artistic clout, critics continue to dismiss Miranda July as “cutesy” and “twee,” labels that reflect an inability to distinguish between her work and her persona. Over at Guernica, Tin House editor Rob Spillman argues in defense of whimsy:

Part of the reason that some find July’s literary success so galling is that she is not simply a novelist; she is “Miranda July” a continuingly evolving conceptual art project, as well as the writer, director, and star of two movies.

The New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium is a weekly forum for discussing the tradition and future of text/image work. Open to the public, it meets Tuesday nights 7-9 p.m. EST in New York City. (more…)

For the Telegraph, Gaby Wood speaks with Kazuo Ishiguro about his new release The Buried Giant. The novel is Ishiguro’s first book in ten years, however the author has not been taking a “break,” working hard to find a project that was “good enough” to complete. Like some of his past publications, the novel deals heavily with the exploration of memory. However, The Buried Giant makes a slight departure from Ishiguro’s usual approach to this theme, as it focuses more on societal memory rather than personal relationships with the past.

I find the threat of predation satisfying in a short story because, when done well, it solicits a visceral reaction. The etymology of the word visceral can be traced to the Latin word viscera, which was used to refer to internal organs; the plural term, viscus, refers to “flesh.” A visceral reaction refers to an instinctual reaction, as opposed to an intellectual reaction.

Although Victor Hugo is best known for his novels, the author had an avid interest in the visual arts as well. However, Hugo didn’t publish his visual artwork, fearful that his drawings might interfere with his literary projects. According to his son’s notes about his father’s process, Hugo would often complete his drawings “with a light shower of black coffee” directly onto the paper. Check out some of Hugo’s works at the Paris Review.

Many of us choose to pursue MFAs; many of us are also plagued with doubts about the value of a degree in creative writing. Former teacher Ryan Boudinot shares his wisdom about programs, publishing, and the unlikely chance that you’re the Real Deal:

I think the instant validation of our apps is an enemy to producing the kind of writing that takes years to complete… If you’re able to continue writing while embracing the assumption that no one will ever read your work, it will reward you in ways you never imagined.

Sticking a grade-schooler in front of Star Trek might lead to a brief obsession with spandex, but with me it also meant absorbing tons of non-grade school words. From “purview” to “enmity” to “geneticist” to plain-old “stoic,” the scholarly verbal style of Mr. Spock made my child-self even more bookish than I already was. But my connection with Spock went beyond words. Because while Leonard Nimoy’s performance as Spock did make me love books differently, he also taught me about the inherent coolness of being your own brand of brainy outsider.

Folk tales are a shared genealogy. To read them is to recognize where one story descends from another, to learn the preoccupations of the storytellers and their communities, to make note of universal tales whose concerns are eternal, and to see where trade across borders has shared as many ideas as miles of road. They are a map of what we hold dearest and pass down, and to discover new tales is to piece together long-lost family.

NPR Books reviews The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales and talks about the importance of fairy tales to our shared history.

A new bibliography cataloguing the various editions of Harry Potter publications will help readers identify which edition of the books they own. The collection will also reveal secrets of JK Rowling’s edits, reports the Guardian. The 544-page book took Sotheby’s director Philip Errington five years to compile and includes such facts as alternative titles like Harry Potter and the Death Eaters, Harry Potter and the Fire Goblet and Harry Potter and the Three Champion.

On February 26, 1995, just about twenty years ago, Newsweek published an article by Clifford Stoll called “Why the Internet Won’t Be Nirvana.” In it, Stoll provides a litany of faults to be found in the nascent web. Although there’s a decidedly un-zen tone to the article, Stoll makes some surprisingly accurate predictions—right alongside some laughable ones.

For starters, Stoll writes: “The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.” Wow. Wrong on all counts. (more…)

Monday 3/2: It’s the first Monday of the month, which means Speakeasy is here for you to practice that thing you’ve been working on to someone other than your cats friends. Signups start at 7:45 p.m., readings begin at 8 p.m. at The Last Bookstore.

And in the Saturday Essay, Amanda Miska realizes she is making the object of her love into a “myth,” into “the version of the story that [she] wanted to believe.” Framed by the constant presence of social media, Miska analyzes the motivation behind Internet “stalking”—the desire to win. She writes of past lovers:

“We see their Twitter feeds as lines of dialogue, their Instagram photos as setting, their Facebook connections or passive-aggressive status updates as the plot lines.”

That Guy in Your MFA is neither a guy nor a student in an MFA program. He’s actually a woman, Dana Schwartz, a Brown University undergraduate. Schwartz also runs the twitter Dystopian YA Novel that satirizes series like Divergent. She tells Chicago Reader that she invented the alter egos because her writing workshops had too many stories about guys on trains:

“They all had trains,” she says, “and a man leaving his family because he is too complicated and deep. It was this wannabe sophomore lit writing that could be Jonathan Franzen, except not quite as good.”

Be assured, serious readers, that there is no more successful writer at walking the edge of speculation and genre. She’s so good at what she does, that it makes her work nearly impossible to describe without sounding soft or even silly. No one is more gifted at dipping into a darker kind of wonder, an emotion for most readers that sadly belongs to the realm of childhood, than Link is. She bewilders the reader with wonder.

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Welcome to TheRumpus.net. We don’t say that lightly—we’re thrilled you’re here. At The Rumpus, we’ve got essays, reviews, interviews, advice, music, film and poetry—along with some kick-ass comics. We know how easy it is to find pop culture on the Internet, so we’re here to give you something more challenging, to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path. The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing, to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know how, and to invite each of you, as readers, commenters or future contributors, to do the same. What we have in common is a passion for fantastic writing that’s brave, passionate and true (and sometimes very, very funny).(more)